Consent in action: Learning from artistic research within an institutional review context

Abstract

This article examines how artistic research practices challenge and reconfigure institutional approaches to research ethics. Focusing on the case of Performing Working —a doctoral project in the arts that was the first to undergo ethical review at the University of the Arts Utrecht —it investigates how forms of consent, researcher roles, and institutional responsibility are negotiated when research is processual, embodied, and collaboratively developed.

The article draws on a collaborative autoethnographic reflection involving the artist-researcher, a research participant, and members of the ethics committee. Care ethics is used as a conceptual lens to analyse the ethical dimensions of the case, foregrounding relationality, vulnerability, and attention to power. Rather than treating ethical approval as a one-off procedural hurdle, the analysis highlights ethics as an ongoing, situated practice that unfolds through dialogue, friction, and mutual attunement.

Artistic research is presented here as a ‘hard case’ that reveals structural frictions in existing review systems. At the same time, it offers alternative imaginaries and practices for dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and co-responsibility in research. While grounded in an artistic context, the article speaks to broader concerns in qualitative research methodology, particularly in fields that engage with lived experience, reflexivity, and shared authority. Ethics is reframed not merely as compliance, but as integral to how research is shaped, shared, and held accountable across diverse domains.